To: arun gera who wrote (21418 ) 8/19/2007 7:21:19 PM From: Slagle Respond to of 218005 Arun, Thats pretty reasonable. Maybe you have colored things a bit differently than I would have, but over all, there is not much to find fault with. I think you may have painted things a bit more starkly "black and white" than I would have and present "the US" or "the west" as a monolith directed towards a common goal. We know now for sure from declassified documents and biographies that within the ruling elite that there were all kinds of factions and differences of opinion. Another point I might contest is that you seem to be trying to say that we, meaning the USA I suppose, "created" the "consumer societies" in all these third world places. Arun, all these places, most of them former European colonies, already had market economies and most of them had been that way from antiquity. The new thing in the world was not private ownership as practiced during the colonial period, but the collectivist method as promoted by the Marxists. And I sure agree that the nuclear weapon was the "big one". This stopped the Soviets dead in their tracks. Remember, Stalinism was a "heresy" anyway, in Marxist lexicon. Any Trotskyite will be quick to tell you that and to explain why in great detail. You can't have "socialism in one country" and neither can you "impose socialism on the whole world by force of arms". The later was the Stalinist plan, but this was stopped in its infancy by the threat of the atomic bomb. But anyway, the Bolshevik menace is dead and has been for nearly two decades. So now, there is no reason at all for the USA to police the world. There was a time, back in 1962 when there was a chance to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, JFK tried and that might have been a factor in his untimely end. But now, the genie is completely out of the bottle. We should stand aside and let every tin pot dictator and banana republic in the world build a bomb if they want one and if they desire to use their new bomb on their neighbor we should stand aside and let them. That might sound cruel but a few of these exchanges might teach some important lessons. If India and Pakistan want to nuke each other to kingdom come, let them. At the peak of the cold war a full scale nuclear exchange between us and the Soviets would have put the survival of the whole world in peril. India and Pakistan don't have near the throw weight to do that. When we retire as "world policeman" Elmats everywhere will be begging for us to come back, after they get a taste of the "brave new world" of the nuclear armed ministate. Slagle